Senior Citizens Writing Code

Hey, you young wiper - snappers.... don't tell us how to make money online. Even though you laugh at our niche, we old hippies have been running a successful e-comm website for over 10 years. We make more profit than a lot of social media influencers.

If you thing old people just like to sleep a lot you are correct. We have developed our passive recurring revenue model that makes money while we sleep. Every morning one of our first e-mails is from our merchant account showing how much revenue was batched out last night. Then we get our morning coffee.

Our specialty is something we have been using long before the internet was invented - faxing. Yes, it’s still a thing. It was quite the technological breakthrough when it came out. Everyone wanted to play with the machine. Since few businesses had one, we would send each other joke lists and other meaningless stuff. Our competitors would send us job application forms for McDonalds. We would send them fake orders for a million dollars. Slowly, with more industry wide acceptance, the machine became a more standard tool, like our typewriters. (Cell phones were still decades away) This technology has somehow stuck around. Since then, we have gone high tech and now run FAXtopia, an online fax service.

We’re just three senior citizens, all approaching 70 years old. Bob, the sales and marketing guy, is a true digital nomad. When not hanging out in Asia or the Caribbean, lives in a small beach town in Florida. He became an expert in fax marketing in the 1980s when he was a travelling salesman. He’s actually known as the original creator of spam. A lasting legacy, but not his proudest achievement.

The webmaster, Linda, is a retired school teacher living in the hills of South Carolina. She is an expert at graphic design and site usability. She’s also a skilled HTML expert, writing raw code for websites. She learned this skill when she was in her sixties and I’ve never found anyone who can hand code HTML better and cleaner than her.

The programmer, Charlie, is a Veteran and now is an expert developing e-commerce tools and creating custom functionality. Thanks to him, the website runs flawlessly. He’s the youngster of the group, but has his grumpy old man moments and some stubbornness about how things should be set up. (kids these days)

We all come from the corporate world and understand how business works. We’ve been working out of our home offices for the past ten years, way pre-covid. Our schedules are totally flexible so sometimes we take a week off and sometimes we’re checking e-mails on the weekends. We do have occasional conference calls, but the company and the website are so well established that it mostly runs itself.

Some of the various projects we have to tackle are keeping the content and graphic design of the website up to date and looking modern. Incorporating the latest technologies to prevent malware and hack attempts are the big challenges. Also, following Google updates to keep our rankings high is a priority. This keeps us sharp and our minds young. The group has an occasional get together, really just party trips, and expense them for the tax deductions.

When meet younger digital entrepreneurs at industry conferences and tell them about our website they all just roll their eyes and tell us how antiquated our service is. We agree with them and tell them stay away from it.

So, next time you see a group of old, grey-haired people hanging out at the beach, they just might be successful digital nomads travelling the country and discussing upgrades to their e-commerce platform.